Monday, March 22, 2010

I reached some 15 minutes late. Nick Sieger was already taking on "Exploring Rails 3 through choices". He was taking about/demoing some cool features coming up in Rails 3. I like the lazy querysets part, which was missing in Rails and was already available in Django.

Pradeep Elankumaran, a US based entrepreneur, then took the stage and talked about the huge trend of startups in India. The session was very interactive with Pradeep talking on "The Startup Mindset" and the people in the audience chipping in with their views/experiences on the startup trend. I was listening intently and reflecting why I am not ready to do a startup at this stage of my career. The discussion ate into the lunchtime.

Post lunch I sat through Sarah Taraporewalla's session "Taming of the View". She talked on how/why Rails erb templating sucks and mentioned other ways of developing good Views including a tool she developed called Slippers.

Vineet Tyagi talked next on how he build his Web Application Server, WebROaR. It was cool how he compared building an appserver to building a house and went ground up. He was very good at explaining stuff, it was like slitting in a classroom.

I then took a coffee break. I later realised I missed an awesome talk by Brian Guthrie on Advanced Ruby Idioms. The next talk "Hacking and learning from Open source Ruby (Open source Rubyisms)" by Sreekanth Vadagiri went totally over my head.

The last show at RubyConf India, 2010 was ThoughtWorks Founder/Chairman Roy Singham. I looked up Ry on the internet and found that he does not have a significant online presence, quite a surprising thing for the leader of a Company like ThoughtWorks. He talked about agile and other recent trends in the software industry and how they have been producing good results. There was a minor flame war between Roy and Obie when he mentioned the split between the Ruby and Rails community. He mentioned that the 28 women at RubyConf India was the maximum attendance for women at ant Ruby/Rails conference in the world. He wanted us to use our enthusiasm and help the not so fortunate people in India.

It was 6pm and I had to run to the BLR Airport for my flight at 8:30pm. What happened there is another story.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Arrived yesterday(Friday). Staying with my friends at BTM Layout. Its a bit far from the RubyConf venue.

Reached a bit late to the conference, (due to some venue location problems). I got my speaker/delegate kit. Ola Bini had already started with his talk on "The Future of Programming languages". He was talking of various programming languages and different programming paradigms, with special reference to Ruby.

Obie Fernandez came next with his talk titled - "Blood, Sweat and Rails 2010". His talk was pretty fun. From what I gather he worked with ThoughtWorks and now has his own company called HashRocket(both RubyConf India sponsors). His talk was filled with anecdotes from his work experience and their work culture. He also talked about Rails best practices. He used a lot of 'expletives' and was reprimanded for that.

After lunch(which was very tasty), I could be found sitting at the Sessions Hall(Track 1) looking through my slides and writing notes. There were a lot of people attending at the room, so I was a bit nervous. Ivan Porto Carrero could not make it to India so they set up a Skype video call for his talk - "IronRuby: The Ruby &.NET Love Child". There was a lot of technical glitches and the talk finished fast. I was next.

Because of all the confusion in the previous talk, the attendance had rarefied. I was feeling a bit more confident as a result(don't ask me why). I did not screw up much during my talk(except for the RoR requires a steep learning curve part, which the audience did not approve of; followed by a heated discussion). I had made my slides using Latex+Beamer(was an interesting experiment, came out good). I have shared them here.

I rushed to the main hall, where they were setting up a video call with Yukihiro (matz) Matsumoto, the developer/designer of Ruby. His talk was called 'Ruby 124C141+'. The name referred to a science fiction novel of a similar name. 124C41 meant "one to foresee for one", and he was basically all about the future of Ruby Language. His talk was interesting and informative. The audience went crazy.

After that I attended Sitting in Sai Venkatakrishnan & Hari Krishnan's talk "Concurrency patterns with Ruby"(which I did not pay much attention to) and "Mortal Kombat" presented by SlideShare Designer, Arun J and Lead Developer, Kapil Mohan(which was pretty interesting, and they addressed the code-embedded-in-template problem by using hquery).